Govinda: Myth retold or revisionist fiction?

The Aryavarta Chronicles, Book 1: GOVINDA, by Krishna Udayasankar, New Delhi: Hachette India, 472 pp, paperback. $25.

 
I remember reading an interview of the late Chilean author Roberto Bolano in which he said that in the third world countries, blooming of literary fiction precedes mushrooming of genre fiction. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing in itself, I won’t go into that (perhaps one needs both?) but this is how the literary scene has evolved in India.

First, there were the R K Narayans and the Raja Raos, then there were the Naipauls, the Anita Desais, and Kamala Markandayas and then came the generation of new diaspora writers such as Rushdie, Vikram Seth and others. At home, the Stephanians ruled the roost for a time but with the liberalization of the Indian economy and the rise of a new Indian middle class, slowly and steadily Indian writing in English, largely an upper middle class phenomenon, went down a slippery slope.

Then came along Chetan Bhagat, the writer-prophet of this newly minted middle class. His novels found a bridge with India’s youth. Since his arrival on the scene, there has been a deluge of fiction from all kinds of hacks. Suddenly, Indian writing in English has become accessible to anyone who knows how to read a sentence in English. Today, home-grown Indian writers are writing sci-fi novels and thrillers and there are writers who specialize in chick lit and teen lit (I’m sure Clitlit will follow soon after the success of Fifty Shades of Grey). The number of books sold by these authors has jumped through the roof and publishers, both desi and foreign, are only too happy to encash this trend.

One of the genres that have bloomed during this revolution is that of mythology or the retelling of stories from India’s past. Today, there are many leading names in this genre. Amish Tripathi’s The Immortals of Meluha has become such a runaway hit that a famous Bollywood film director has bought its film rights. I am tempted to place Krishna Udayasankar’s debut novel’s Govinda (The Aryavarta Chronicles, #1) in this category but perhaps I should not.

This is not a junk-food-novel. A few pages into the novel and you know you are reading a well-researched work, a work of mytho-history.


Blast from the past
What is the challenge and thrill of writing a story that is already known? Why is the past more interesting than the contemporary? Why would a writer choose to go back to the past and wrest her material from there? These are questions only the writer can answer. I guess, and I am only speculating here, that this is something to do with the motivations of the writer.

What could those motivations be? Is it a story that Krishna has grown up with, thinking it through her mind, raveling and unraveling its myriad secrets and twists, fascinated by its characters? Or is she trying to give a voice to the voiceless (most importantly, to the female characters of the Mahabharata, especially Panchali), that is, is she rewriting their well-known stories with feminist undertones? The female characters in the novel are very self-conscious of their status, the rights that have been denied to them and the social injustice that happens to them in the name of tradition and law. Is there any historical proof of this (that, this was how their minds worked)? Or is this was how the writer needed to balance out the world of the Mahabharata, bythrusting today’s moral positions onto characters who lived several thousand years ago?

You may agree or disagree with the author’s decision to mix up the worldviews, but one thing you must admire is the language that she has employed in her novel: lush, vivid and evocative. It is a welcome relief, given the state of immaturity of commercial Indian writing in English. The danger was that she could have fallen into pushing the language of her narrative into theatricality. She has thankfully avoided that.

This is the story of Govinda, the cowherd prince and the commander-in-chief of Dwarka but most other characters have also been so well-etched out that you get lost with them in the thicket of the story. Also, some readers can get overwhelmed by dealing with so many characters in the novel.

In Govinda, the heroes are mythic characters and yet they are ordinary. The writer has stripped them of their magical powers. Imposing this kind of realism onto mythical characters is an achievement in itself—it is certainly genre-bending in that sense.

Krishna’s writing style betrays her scholarship (she is a lecturer) and she does not stoop to be over-simple to garner mass market success. However, in an otherwise authentic piece of writing, the soldiers wear ‘boots’, there are ‘roads’ and ‘assassins’, and a prince is ‘bookish’. These objects or actions or strategies might have existed in some form in the remote past but is it appropriate to use these modern day words to signify them? These are minor details but they jumped out at me because everything else seemed to be so perfect, that without these jarring notes, the writer’s spell would have continued unbroken for me (for example, you can translate ‘naan’ as bread but does that feel right?). Yet, this is a useless quarrel to pick up. ‘Why write the novel in English then?’ the writer can argue back. ‘Write in Sanskrit.’ Fair point.

While Krishna’s writing is first-rate and most scenes are beautifully developed, sometimes overwrought descriptions slow down the pace of the novel. This is not your typical airport novel. This is a fine read that needs your languorous attention. And even if you call this novel genre fiction, it re-establishes my faith in young Indian writers who can write without compromising on the quality of the prose.

You have to welcome a book like this at a time when Fifty Shades of Grey is all the rage. If Fifty is a gori courtesan who promises to fulfill your fantasies in bed, then Govinda is a charming, brave and respectable soldier-scholar who has a tale to tell.

Shooting the Messenger?

Julian Assange does a Chen Guangcheng in London

By Zafar Anjum

Remember the blind Chinese human rights advocate Chen Guangcheng, who escaped from house arrest on 22 April and sought sanctuary in the US embassy? Later on, the Chinese government gave him a safe passage to the US where he now lives and studies.

That was one month ago.

I was reminded of this incident when I learned about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange skipping bail en route from a court in London on Tuesday (19 June) and taking asylum in the embassy of Ecuador.

He has reportedly applied for asylum in that country. Interestingly, he had recently interviewed the President of Ecuador on his TV show for Russia TV. “Cheer up. Welcome to the club of the persecuted,” the Ecuador's leftist President Rafael Correa told Assange at the end of the interview.

In the same week that Chen escaped from house arrest in China, Julian Assange lost his court appeal against being extradited to Sweden for questioning about allegations of sexual offences.

Assange’s latest step is quite dramatic. It has caused a stir in diplomatic circles and freedom watchers are keenly following the developments.

Assange’s fear is that once he reaches Sweden, he will be deported to the US where he could face death penalty on charges of espionage. The US government has already issued a statement that they have no role to play in Assange’s case.

Meanwhile, Australia (of which Assange is a citizen) said that the country had made representations to the Swedish government on behalf of Assange. The country’s Foreign Minister Senator Carr said that ‘Australia could not fight his case for him on the sexual assault or anything else in another jurisdiction, nor could it for any other Australian’.

Looming arrest

It has been reported that President Correa has been impressed with Assange’s letter of appeal. AP reported that Julian Assange wants to continue his WikiLeaks work in Ecuador, according to a letter he sent to the country's president.

According to the report, President Rafael Correa said the country would take its time making a decision "because this is a very serious matter". Another report said that a swift decision is expected from his side (maybe within 24 hours).

But legal experts believe that even if Assange gets the asylum, he could be arrested on his way to the airport (to take a plane to Ecuador) for breaching bail.

There are other opinions too. This is what the Sydney Morning Herald (AAP) had to say: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s bold bid for asylum in Ecuador may well pay off, an Australian expert believes.

Australian National University international law expert Donald Rothwell says the bid could work, said the report. “He’s made a calculated judgment that on the basis of his interactions with the Ecuadorian government that he's fairly confident he will be granted asylum by this particular country,” Professor Rothwell told AAP.

“But ultimately whether Ecuador grants him asylum is a political judgment based on whatever arguments or evidence Mr Assange is able to put to support his case.”

‘Ecuadorian asylum would put him beyond the reach of Sweden and possibly also the US, Prof Rothwell says. Ecuador has an extradition treaty with the US, but it excludes those wanted on political charges.’

It remains to be seen how the drama will now unfold. Will Ecuador provide asylum to Assange? Even if he gets it, will the UK government give him a safe passage to the airport?

Given Assange’s astuteness and resourcefulness, even that is not far-fetched for him. His story might well be one of the greatest escapes of this century.

Though Assange’s critics say that he should not have jumped bail and should have faced the questioning by the Swedish government, his mother says that her son ‘was left with no option but to seek political asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London’.

It would be interesting what Chen would have to say to Assange on this matter as ironically, the same land of freedom that Chen has chosen to escape to, is interested in getting hold of Assange and making him pay for the crime of exposing the greatest power on earth.

First published in MIS Asia.com.

Want to be a Bollywood scriptwriter? Here is your opportunity

I was thrilled when I heard a few days back that Anusha Rizvi and Mahmood Farooqui (I had loved their first film, Peepli Live) had written a screenplay (Opium) based on Amitav Ghosh's novel, Sea of Poppies and are going to direct the film. I look forward to movies by this talented duo who, I think, are still under-appreciated in India. 

When I read the full story, I found out that they are developing the screenplay with Mumbai Mantra/Sundance Institute Screenwriters Lab. The lab selected 8 feature films for development and Rizvi's Opium, is one of them.

Now, Mumbai Mantra is looking for new screenwriters for the Lab for 2013. If you have an idea for a screenplay, this is your opportunity. Don't miss it!

Here are the details:

The inaugural Mumbai Mantra | Sundance Institute Screenwriters Lab 2012 was an over whelming success. In a uniquely inspired Club Mahindra environment , 9 Indian screenwriters got an opportunity to engage in one-on-one meetings with 11 Creative Advisors from across the globe and get indispensable lessons in craft, a fresh perspective on their work and a platform to fully realize their material !

We are now inviting applications for the Mumbai Mantra | Sundance Institute Screenwriters Lab 2013. This is your chance to be one of the 6-8 fellows who shall be selected for a 5-day intensive workshop with Creative Advisors who are acclaimed Global Screenwriters and Directors.

Click for more info on the Lab >>

APPLY NOW for the Mumbai Mantra | Sundance Institute
Screenwriters Lab 2013

All you need is -

>>   A synopsis
>>   First five pages of your screenplay
>>   An artistic statement
>>   A cover letter

Last Date for Open Submission: June 2, 2012
Click here for the application process >>

If you have any more queries related to Mumbai Mantra| Sundance Institute Screenwriters Lab 2013, please email us at labqueries@mumbaimantra.com

The doctor and the snake charmer

These days my mother is here and she tells us a story when she is in the mood.

One day we were talking about the common people, the little people—people that we label as the masses: labourers, farm hands, servants, and even snake charmers, and how they have become too powerful, dangerously powerful, in India these days.

In our native place, snake charmers are maybe a rank above beggars and mendicants. They go about, from village to village, with their boxes of snakes and a been (which is like a bagpipe), hold a little tamasha, a snake show, and then scare people into giving away some donations. People would throw little coins into the chaddar or sackcloth that the snake charmer would lay on the ground after the show. That’s all that they do for their livelihood.

Sometimes they are in demand when a snake enters a house. Then, they have to be called, like you would call a doctor for a house visit to see a patient who is too frail or in too serious a condition to be taken to a clinic.

So, this story is about one such snake charmer and about a doctor who works in a government-funded clinic. A government-funded clinic in Bihar most probably means a place where you might get a prescription from the doctor for free but no medicines. Either, there is no money for medicines for poor patients or the money has been eaten and digested by the hungry python called the bureaucracy on the way to the clinic.

One day, a snake charmer visited a government clinic with his sick wife. After a little wait, the government doctor gave the patient a consultation. The snake charmer expected free medicines but the doctor gave him only a prescription. “Buy the medicines from a pharmacy,” he told the poor snake charmer.

The snake charmer had no choice but to spend the money to save his wife’s life. It cost him 200 rupees and caused him a great deal of anger.

He thought—since this is a government clinic, I should get the medicines for free from here. Why do I have to pay?

He might have thought—this doctor must be corrupt. Maybe he is part of the system that thrives on drinking the blood of people.

“I should teach him a lesson,” he decided.

A few days later, the doctor came to his clinic one morning. He was out of his wits to see a snake lazily sitting on his desk. Seeing him, the snake raised its head and unfurled its hood. Shrieking, the doctor ran out of his room.

Soon, there was a hue and cry about the snake in the clinic. Some people tried to shoo the snake away from the room. It didn’t budge. Some tried to scare it away. It didn’t move an inch. Someone suggested a snake charmer should be called in. The doctor agreed.

The snake charmer was already there in the crowd—actually, all this was his handiwork. He had come earlier than the doctor that day and through the back window, had let the snake into the doctor’s room.

When no one could move the snake, he offered his services. Everyone was relieved, specially the doctor who had not been able to enter his chamber. The queue of patients was getting longer and longer and the doctor was getting worried.

But then came the surprise. The snake charmer demanded 1000 rupees for the job.

“This is not fair,” the doctor protested. “Yes, this is not fair. This is too exorbitant.” The people supported the doctor.

“Then how fair it was,” the snake charmer retorted, “to make me spend rupees 200 for my wife’s medicines?”

The doctor recognized the man. He understood the whole game. The ‘small man’ was exacting his revenge on a ‘respectable man’.

The doctor had no choice but to pay him the sum. The snake charmer promptly removed the snake from the room and went away. He had his revenge.

The day was ruined for the doctor.

My mother says small men in India have become too bold. They can’t be controlled any more. Respectable people have to be careful of such small men if they want to preserve their ‘respectability’.

The arrested development of Julian Assange

Cyberspace's most famous activist, Julian Assange, has been under house arrest for more than a year now. But he is not keeping quiet.

By Zafar Anjum

Is it retrogressive if a new media pioneer goes back to the traditional mainstream media to air his views?

Whatever you call it, this is exactly what Cyberspace’s most famous activist, Julian Assange, the editor in chief of WikiLeaks, is going to do today.

In January this year, WikiLeaks announced that Assange would launch "a series of in-depth conversations with key political players, thinkers and revolutionaries from around the world", titled The World Tomorrow.

Perhaps Assange had no choice but to try something traditional. One, he is under house arrest in the U.K, which means travelling is out for him. Two, his WikiLeaks has been denied the oxygen of money for about 500 days now. The website is facing a financial blockade imposed by U.S. banks.

It is noteworthy that as long as Assange did not touch the banks, he was tolerated by the system. The leaks of U.S. embassy cables damaged the reputation of many countries and their heads but Assange was still able to do his work. When he was about to leak some secret documents of a bank (reportedly it was Bank of America), all hell broke loose.

Assange might have learnt his lesson. It is fine to touch politicians. But never touch the bankers.

Or, has he? His show will reveal it.

The World Tomorrow

The first episode of Assange’s show is going to air today. He has chosen RT, an English-language international satellite news channel, headquartered in Russia. The programme will also be broadcast on other national channels.

This will be a weekly show and each episode will be 26 minutes long.

Assange, who is under house arrest, faces allegations of rape and sexual assault lodged by two women in Sweden. Britain's Supreme Court is to decide if Assange should be extradited to Sweden. Ironically, no charges have been officially filed against him.

RT has said that the programme, written and hosted by Assange, will focus on his favourite topic: controversy. The show will feature 10 "iconoclasts, visionaries and power insiders" – people Assange can clearly identify with, the channel said.

The show has been shot at the very location that Julian Assange has been under house arrest for the last year and a half.

In a recent interview with RT, Assange said that he chose RT because he found the channel’s penetration higher than Al Jazeera’s. “We’ve seen RT’s reportage on the attacks on WikiLeaks for a number of years, and that reportage has generally been quite supportive,” he said. “When we were looking what international broadcaster we wished to partner with as opposed to national broadcasters, we looked to see what was the penetration into the United States. And RT had higher penetration in the United States than Al Jazeera.”

“The BBC is the leading contestant but the BBC has been acting in a hostile manner towards us so we didn’t consider that the BBC would be an appropriate partner,” he said.

“RT is rallying a global audience of open-minded people who question what they see in mainstream media and we are proud to premiere Julian Assange’s new project,” editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan said in a statement on the television network's website.

In the RT interview, Assange also talked about his experience of working with mainstream media companies like The Guardian and the New York Times. “Any organisation, once it grows to a sufficient size and has sufficient influence, starts having to make political compromises,” he said. “And media organisations, by their very nature, are engaged in the political sphere. So the editors and publishers of media organisations have to sit down at the table with power groups, and they start becoming captured by these power groups.”

“So, we have found that working with them, when we try to get out our material through organisations, say, such as The Guardian, or the New York Times, or the BBC, that these organisations self-censor in a tremendously frequent manner and in a way which is against their stated values. It is not just against our values.”

“It is against their stated values. And in some cases even against the contracts that we have made with those organisations,” he added.

Assange even predicted how mainstream media companies will react to his show. “Let’s imagine a sort of obvious one,” he said. “There’s Julian Assange, enemy combatant, traitor, getting into bed with the Kremlin and interviewing terrible radicals from around the world. But I think it’s a pretty trivial kind of attack on character. If they actually look at how the show is made: we make it, we have complete editorial control, we believe that all media organisations have an angle, all media organisations have an issue.”

This is what CNN had to say about the show: “Commentators outside Russia have questioned the apparent link the show creates between Assange and the Kremlin, given RT's government-funded status.”

Whatever the criticism, the world will pay attention to what Assange has to say about the world tomorrow. Bring it on, Assange. We are all ears.

Five days in San Francisco

When I reached the San Francisco International Airport (SFO) on 27 February after an 18 hour-long journey, I was struck by its relative simplicity—no in your-face opulence, no plush carpeting and lush greenery, no colourful paintings, advertisements or messages on the wall. It was bare, minimal, and utilitarian. Even though there were some murals on the wall that showed the history of the airport (the airport was built in 1927), they seemed unobtrusive. Clearly, this airport was not jostling for any international awards like Seoul, Singapore and Hong Kong airports did. It exuded the equipoise and quiet simplicity of a veteran compared to a parvenu’s over-eagerness to please and score points. How else could I explain it?

But the airport’s snaking queues at the immigration area did remind me of the scenes at Shanghai and Sydney airports. It was a stark contrast to Singapore where I have rarely seen a crowd of travelers thronging the immigration area. Quite noticeable was a group of young Chinese students who were chatting noisily. Besides the Chinese, there were many Indians too in the queue—both young and old—young IT engineers and parents visiting their children who worked in the U.S.

I cleared immigration in nearly 40 minutes (most of it was spent waiting in the queue), and thankfully, there was no interrogation with the department of homeland security officers.

While waiting for my turn in the queue, I was watching the welcome videos being played on TV monitors in the immigration area. In one video, an ethnically diverse America was on display and each representative of a race said ‘welcome’ to visitors in their own language. An Indian character said Swagatam, that is welcome, in Hindi. It was so pleasing. I immediately felt at home.

When I came out of the airport after collecting my bags, I was hit by the rushing cold gusts. Even though the weather was clear and the day was partly sunny, there was a biting cold in the air and throughout my stay in San Francisco, that chill was to remain my constant companion. I felt as if someone was rubbing ice on my face all the time.

I had to wait for nearly ten minutes to get a taxi—there were no taxis waiting for tourists. This was another contrasting feature because in most Asian cities, we hardly have to wait for cabs. It is the other way around.

“Where do you want to go, brother?” the cabbie asked me. I told him the address while he helped me with the luggage. The cab driver seemed to be a Muslim from an African country. I could see an Arabic newspaper peeping out of a compartment in his dashboard. We hardly spoke with each other during the journey. It took nearly forty minutes to reach my hotel which was in the financial district of the city, very near to the Union Square.

What was interesting about the journey from the airport to the hotel was the view of the city from the taxi’s window. There was the San Francisco Bay on one side and low-rise houses and buildings on the other side, laid out over ridges and slopes of a hilly topography. It was lunch time but the traffic was not mad. The first thought that came to me was that of the expanse and the breadth of the city—dotted with individual houses and not many tall skyscrapers trying to kiss the skies. This led to the second thought that this place definitely couldn’t be as stressful as many big Asian cities where people and high-rises are crammed in small areas like pieces on a puzzle board.

Naturally, I was curious to explore the city as much as I could. Since I was in San Francisco for a conference, sightseeing was possible only when I had free time on hand.

Even though I was staying in a pricey boutique hotel, it lacked facilities that are usually considered normal in Asian hotels. Like coffee in the room. There was a mini bar but there were no electric kettles to help you make tea or coffee. One had to go down to a waiting area near the hotel’s reception at 5 am to get one’s morning tea or coffee. But once there, if you had sipped the coffee, your complaints would vanish. The coffee was good (no cookies though to go with the drink) and I quite liked the half and half milk instead of the skimmed version or the Soya milk to prepare my cuppa.

Outside the hotel on Geary Street, there were many coffee shops, including a Starbucks. I couldn’t get to try one. Only once did I buy a cup of coffee on the go from a sidewalk coffee stall. I think it was called Pete’s Coffee. It wasn’t bad.

The hotel had a good heating system, and once I was in the room, the cold was totally out. I could sleep in a shirt in my room. That was a pleasure. While in the room, I mostly read newspapers or scanned through the travel guides that I had packed. Cable TV was crappy—most channels broadcasted inane shows (comedy, sports, teles-hopping) and for news there were only some local channels on offer. I seemed cut off from the outside world.

Instead, newspapers kept me good company. I could get free copies of The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal and The USA Today in my hotel. Some of my friends were staying at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel and there I could get hold of copies of The San Francisco Examiner. The newspapers were not delivered to my room. I had to go down and pick them up from the reception area.

Panhandlers everywhere

If I stood in front of a hotel or a Walgreens pharmacy store, panhandlers would come and ask me for a cigarette or a dollar. Some homeless people pitched me their association’s newspaper instead of directly panhadling. Street Sheet of the Coalition on Homelessness went for a suggested minimum donation of one dollar. I bought the January issue which was a poetry special. Most of the poems in the newspaper spoke of the problem of homelessness in the city. According to Wikipedia, San Francisco, due to its mild climate and its social programs that have provided cash payments for homeless individuals, is often considered the homelessness capital of the United States, together with Los Angeles. The city’s homeless population has been estimated at 7,000-10,000 people, of which approximately 3,000-5,000 refuse shelter. The city spends US$200 million a year on homelessness related programs.

While scanning the local newspapers, two items that caught my eye were the shutting down of airline services in smaller towns in the country. Airline capacity is decreasing in America (went down by 6 percent last year), as airlines are downsizing or completely cutting off their services on loss-making routes (United Airlines dominates the US airlines business but there are some small players in the market too). I see similar problems in India as private airlines are fighting for survival.

The other item was not actually a problem. The day I had arrived in San Fran, the Academy Awards took place but I witnessed no Oscar mania in the American national or local media—at least not like the one I have seen in India and Singapore. For example, I didn’t see the Oscar coverage on the front pages of newspapers. The NYT carried a story that said that the TV ratings of the Academy Awards’ annual show were going down. There were also reports that bashed the performance of this year’s show host Billy Crystal; Sacha Baron Cohen’s dictator prank and J Lo’s wardrobe malfunction created some stir in the media.

Since my hotel was in the theatre district, I passed by many theatres and art galleries on my way to the conference venue at the Moscone Centre (one play was on, and another play with Jonathan Price was to start in late March). Adjacent to the Moscone centre is the Yerba Buena Centre where iPad 3 is scheduled to be launched on March 7. Close to these two centres is the SFMOMA. It is a famous museum but I could not get a chance to visit it.

We are so used to seeing Seven Eleven stores here but over there I could spot only one where I stayed. I saw more branches of the pharmacy Walgreens than those of Seven Elevens. And Walgreens sells you many things—from medicines to cosmetics to clothes and food items. Some of the stores are open until midnight and some are open 24 hours a day.

They city has many tobacconists too who sell tobacco products and alcoholic beverages. Beware that prices of items vary from shop to shop.

Since I was staying near the Union Square area, which is also the shopping district, I could visit many shopping centres such as Macy’s, Saks at 5th Avenue and Neiman Marcus. Nordstrom in the Westfield Shopping Centre is spread over several floors but I could not find a toy section there.

During my stay in San Francisco, I used taxis, buses, trains and cable cars. Taxis are not as cheap as in Singapore. Cable cars are fun but they come for $6 per ride. Bus rides are interesting because a two dollar ticket can afford you many rides during a given 3-4 hours time frame.

Among the city’s famous tourist spots, I could only visit the Fisherman’s Wharf and the Golden Gate Bridge, both at unearthly hours. I had a delicious crab, the spiciest one available in the restaurant, at around midnight. Outside, it was very cold and most of the outlets were closed. There were hardly any tourists there at that time and I could hear the seagulls and the sea lions in the semidarkness of the cold night.

Reading the city guides I had thought that the wharf and the Golden Gate Bridge were close by. They are not. I had to take two buses to reach the bridge early in the morning. It was a great view, even though it was drizzling and gusts of chilly winds were blowing, making it difficult for me to walk on the bridge. Because of inclement weather, I abandoned the plan to walk across the length of the bridge.

On the last day, I took the Bart train to the Silicon Valley to meet a friend (from Powell Station to Freemont). It took me about one hour, the train ride was comfortable, and I had to buy a ticket of only $5.60. It would have cost me around $100 if I had taken a cab. I spent a few hours with my friend and his family and finally got a taste of the American suburbia.

The saddest part of the trip, as I recall now, was the sight of panhandlers and the homeless braving the cold at night, sleeping on pavements with their dogs and cats. It was painful to see people looking for food in the trash bins in a rich city like San Francisco.

By the time I returned to the airport to embark on my return journey (2 March), I was already longing for the sun and warmth in Singapore.

Urdu poet Shaharyar passes away

Seene mein jalan aankhon mein tufaan saa kyon hain?
is shahar mein har shakhs pareshaan saa kyon hain?

These immortal lines, from the Hindi film Gaman, were born out of the pen of Aligarh-based Urdu poet and scholar, Shaharyar. Most lovers of Hindustani ghazals will remember his lyrics from the film, Umrao Jaan.

Dil chiiz kya hai aap merii jaan liiji'e
bas ek baar mera kahaa...maan liiji'e

Every time you see Madam Rekha in a Bollywood awards show, the above lines from Umrao Jaan are played in the background. These lines have become a signature, a shorthand for Rekha.

Well, the man behind these lines, the Jnanpith Award winning poet Prof. A. M. K. Shaharyar has passed away. I heard of his demise via Twitter this morning. The famous poet was 76 and was reportedly suffering from cancer. He is survived by a daughter and two sons.

Though Shaharyar Saheb was not as prolific as Javed Akhtar Saheb and Gulzar Saheb in film lyrics writing, his lyrics for films like Umrao Jan, Gaman and Fasle, are enough proof that he was a master of the genre.

Born in Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh, Prof. Shaharyar studied in Aligarh Muslim University, also my alma mater. He became a lecturer in the Urdu department in 1966 and rose through the ranks to assume the post of the department's chairman. He edited the Urdu literary journal, Fikr-o-Nazar. He retired from his job in 1996.

Shaharyar’s first poetic collection was ‘Ism-e-Azam’, published in 1965. It was followed by the publication of another anthology ‘Satwan Dar’ in 1969. I remember translating into English one of the poems from his fourth collection ‘Khwab Ka Dar Band Hai’ (1985). I have lost a copy of the same but it (my translation) was published in a literary journal in Aligarh. During my time in Aligarh, I also once had the opportunity of hearing him speak on Iqbal. He was a very erudite man and the legend was that his house had wall-to-wall bookshelves. He probably owned the richest private library in Aligarh.

For many festivalwallas, contemporary Urdu poetry begins and ends with Janab Javed Akhtar Saheb and Gulzar Saheb (no offense to them; I love them too). But Shaharyar Saheb was in a league of his own. It would be sad not to remember the contributions of this giant of modern Urdu poetry today, especially in an age when we are ready to shed tears for foreign musicians like Whitney Houston who died a victim of drug abuse. I know we live in a globalised world but let us not forget our own.

Rest in peace, dear Shaharyar Saheb.

Why can't Singapore filmmakers make The Descendents?

Last night while I was watching Alexander Payne's The Descendents (2011) in Cathay Orchard, I was thinking: why can't filmmakers in Singapore make a film like this?

Now, there is a reason why this thought crossed my mind.

The Descendents is a small-scale film set in the islands of Hawaii. In the film, a land baron (George Clooney) tries to re-connect with his two daughters after his wife suffers an accident and goes into a coma. Like his last film, Sideways, Payne's new film is also about relationships and is based on a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings.

Geographically speaking, the plot of the film revolves around two Hawaiian islands, Oahu and Kauai. The main city, as shown in the film, like Singapore, has highrise buildings, hotels and resorts. Singapore also has many neighboring islands. Developing property in parts of these islands is one of the main activities of economic growth.

The Descendents is a little, heartwarming comedy, and given its setting, a story like this could have been easily recreated in Singapore or Hong Kong. However, I have not seen a beautiful film like this, based on relationships, made in Singapore or Hong Kong. Most of the films coming from this part of the world are either heartlander comedies, gangster-cop films or horror films or films made with an eye for international awards. I wonder why?

The Nabokov Interviews

"I think like a genius,I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child," thus begins Nabokov's Strong Opinions. It is a book of interviews collected by Nabokov himself--a selection made out of forty interviews in several languages.

Nabokov was very conscious of his speech, which is evident from the opening line. He says in an interview: "I have always been a wretched speaker. My vocabulary dwells deep in my mind and needs paper to wriggle out into the physical zone. Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle. I have rewritten -- often several times -- every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasures."

Beautiful, isn't it? When I first read these statements, my spine tingled with joy.

Whether it was delivering a lecture, or having a telephonic conversation ("my hemmings or hawings") or chit-chatting with people in a party, Nabokov was never off guard or casual about anything. "At parties, if I attempt to entertain people with a good story," he explains, "I have to go back to every other sentence for oral erasures and inserts. Even the dream I describe to my wife across the breakfast table is only a first draft."

To interview such a man was never a straightforward affair (Imagine Nabokov's discomfort in today's world of letters -- hopping from studio to television studio to promote one of his books, or to speak in a literary festival! Actually, he did once appear in a TV interview in London but that too was rehearsed and Nabokov had his notes in front of him, so he could neither stare at the camera nor leer at the questioner--thus appearing squirming and avoiding the camera). Instead, Nabokov insisted on receiving questions in advance and always carefully composed his responses. Anyone who wanted to interview him had to agree to three conditions: The questions had to be sent in writing, answered by him in writing, and reproduced verbatim.

Come to think of this process in our age of email interviews. It works perfectly well, saving each party the disgrace and heartburn of suffering a misquote, or mixing authentic responses with the artificial colour of human interest.

It was not that Nabokov did not enjoy giving interviews. He rather did. "My fiction allows me so seldom the occasion to air my private views that I rather welcome, now and then, the questions put to me in sudden spates by charming, courteous, intelligent visitors," he says. Or see what he says on another occasion: "The luxury of speaking on one theme--oneself--is a sensation not to be despised. But the result is sometimes puzzling."

In his first interview, given at the time of Lolita's film premiere, Nabokov describes himself as a person without public appeal (that is, he was boring as a celebrity): "I have never been drunk in my life. I never use school boy words of four letters. I have never worked in an office or a coal mine. I have never belonged to any club or group. No creed or school has had any influence on me whatsoever. Nothing bores me more than political novels and the literature of the social intent."

Nabokov was never interested in literary fashions, movements or schools. He was interested only in the individual artist. So, while Robbe-Grillet was a great French writer to him, he considered the "anti-novel" a banal and phony commercial label.

To him, a work of art was for an individual, and was of no social importance at all. "What makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not social importance but its art, only its art," he says.

Nabokov could not type and wrote everything in longhand, on index cards. He refused to show an interviewer a sample of his rough drafts. "Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts," was his reply. "It is like passing around samples of one's sputum."

Nabokov, who lived in Europe as a Russian immigre and then moved over to America and spent his last days in Europe again, maintained that the nationality of a worthwhile writer is of secondary importance. "The writer's art is his real passport," he says.

Art is never simple

"A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the Almighty," he says. "Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the backyard of primitive art, the child's scrawl on the fence, and the crank's message in the marketplace. Art is never simple. Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex."

Many of us suffer from the disease of forgetability. So did Nabokov. His other failings as a writer included, in his own words, "lack of spontaneity; the nuisance of parallel thoughts, second thoughts; inability to express myself properly in any language unless I compose every damned sentence in my bath, in my mind, at my desk."

Nabokov had a bleak and "changeless as an old gray oak" political creed, classical to the point of triteness: "Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art. The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions. No music, except coming through earphones or played in theatres." By the way, Nabokov had no ear for music, a shortcoming he deplored bitterly.

Aspects of good reading

To Nabokov, a good reading involved not the heart, but the mind and the spine--yours, not the book's. The heart is a stupid reader, he says. "Ladies and gentlemen, the tingle in the spine really tells you what the author felt and wished you to feel," he used to tell his students.

And he hated yarns spliced with social comments. "The middlebrow or the upper Philistine cannot get rid of the furtive feeling that a book, to be great, must deal in great ideas."

He detested the so-called "powerful novels"--full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialogue. When a publisher sent him a book to read, he would first check for the amount of dialogue in it. "If it looks too abundant or too sustained, I shut the book with a bang, and ban it from my bed."

On writers

Nabokov's favourite writers, he once told an interviewer, were Robbe-Grillet and Borges: "How freely and gratefully one breathes in their marvelous labyrinths!I love their lucidity of thought, the purity and poetry, the mirage in the mirror."

He once described Dostoevski as a cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar. He said that Russians who loved Dostoevski venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He disliked intensely The Karamazov Brothers and the ghastly Crime and Punishment. "He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian," he says. "...His sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment --by this reader anyway."

This more or less mirrors my own attitude to Dostoevski whom I admire but find some of his books too dense to get through. I want a powerful story but it has to be well told, distilled and condensed. Where is the mot juste in his writing?

He considered Anna Karenin the supreme masterpiece of nineteenth-century literature, closely followed by The Death of Ivan Illyich. War and Peace, he says, was written for that amorphic and limp creature known as 'the general reader,' and more specifically for the young.

He considered Hemingway and Conrad 'writers of books for boys'. "Hemingway certainly is the better of the two," he says. He loved his "The Killers" and found the famous fish story superb. While I personally love Hemingway, I could never connect with Conrad's prose. "I cannot abide Conrad's souvenir-shop style, bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches," says Nabokov. "In mentality and emotion, both (Hem and Conrad) are hopelessly juvenile."

What he read between the ages of 10-15: Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Falubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok. "By the age of 14 or 15, I had read or re-read all Tolstoy in Russian, all Shakespeare in English and all Flubert in French --besides hundreds of other books," he writes. But at another level, his heroes were Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock Holmes.


What he read between the ages of 20-40: Houseman, Rupert Brooke, Norman Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin. Of these top favs, several - Poe, Jules Verne, Orczy, Conan Doylem and Rupert Brooke - lost the glamour and thrill for him in later age.

He read some of his coevals such as "the not quite first rate Eliot" and "definitely second rate Pound" late in life--and remained completely indifferent to them. He could not understand why anybody should bother about them. He hated Freud and called him a charlatan. "Let the credulous and vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts," he says. "I really do not care."

Late in his life, he still loved Melville, and liked Hawthorne and Emerson. His feelings towards James were rather complicated.
However, many accepted authors simply did not exist for him: "Their names are engraved on empty graves, their books are dummies, they are complete nonentities insofar as my taste in reading is concerned. Brecht, Faulkner, Camus, many others mean absolutely nothing to me." Same dislike goes for Mann, Dreiser and D H Lawrence.

Nabokov complained against the general attitude in English to pass the word 'genius' around rather generously. In Russian, genius is applied to a very small number of writers such as Shakespeare, Milton, Pushkin and Tolstoy. Turgenev and Chekhov were mere talents. He felt appalled at seeing genius applied to any important storyteller, such as Maupassant or Maugham. "Genius still means to me ... a unique, dazzling gift, the genius of James Joyce, not the talent of Henry James," he says.

Writing for Nabokov was a blend of dejection and high spirits, a torture and a pastime--but he never expected it to be a source of income. Rather he dreamt of a career in lepidoptera.

"If I am told I am a bad poet, I smile; but if told I am a poor scholar, I reach for my heaviest dictionary," he says in an essay, Reply to my Critics. In these interviews, Nabokov is much more interesting than he claims he is not, and as the book's blurb says, in these interviews, letters and articles, Nabokov is as engaging, challenging and caustic as anything he ever wrote.

Faulkner and the purity of exactitude

In my last post, I wrote about my friend Fang Yih, and in that post I had mentioned him as Pynchonian. When he learned of this description of him on my blog, he said I should have marked him as Faulknerian. In fact, he adores both Pynchon and Faulkner (I am yet to start on Pynchon, as I am still reading works of his teacher, Nabokov) and of course, Naipaul, whom both of us admire. Only last night I was reading some passages from Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur to my daughter and I was loving the comedy of the whole thing: it is always a pleasure to read the early Naipaul.

The year is coming to end and I wanted to write something on Faulkner after having read some of his essays and lectures which are available in a beautiful volume titled William Faulkner: Essays, Speeches and Public Letters (edited by James Meriwether, The Modern Library, New York).

The volume opens with Faulkner's essay on Sherwood Anderson, which is in fact an appreciation of one master by another. It is a brilliant sketch and is so evocatively written. You just have to read it to know what I mean by it. I just loved it.

In his later life, Anderson disconnected himself from his family just to focus on his writing--which was sort of an anti-Kafkaesque move.

Faulkner says that Anderson worked so laboriously and tediously and indefatigably at everything he wrote as if he said to himself: This anyway will, shall, must be invulnerable. He writes: "It was as though he wrote not even out of the consuming unsleeping appeaseless thirst for glory for which any normal artist would destroy his aged mother, but for what to him was more important and urgent: not even for mere truth, but for purity, the exactitude of purity."

The exactitude of purity (is it the same is mot jouste?) or the purity of exactitude - I love this expression - it has a sentimental value for me. I first read this phrase in an essay by Carver and he was perhaps referring to this essay by Faulkner which I was lucky enough to have stumbled upon. It was this attempt for exactitude that sometimes made Anderson fumble (often, inviting ridicule). It became his defining style. The writing had to be first rate for him. Nothing else mattered.

One of the great things Faulkner learned from Anderson, besides the exactitude of purity, is that - to be a writer, one has first got to be what he is, what he was born. "You had only to remember what you were," he writes.

"You have to have somewhere to start from: then you begin to learn," Anderson told Faulkner. "It don't matter where it was, just so you remember it and aint ashamed of it."

"... Watch and listen and try to understand; and, even if you can't understand, believe."

That I think turned out to be a great advice for Faulkner as he brought his own country, his patch of land in the vast America, Mississippi, to life on the pages of his fiction. It is another matter that Nabokov dismisses Faulkner's works as corncobian.

Freedom and privacy

Among other things, Faulkner championed freedom and privacy. "Man's hope is in man's freedom," he said once addressing the youth of Japan. These two ideals--freedom for all and privacy for each individual--are still our ideals and seem in greater danger of disappearing today than ever before. He believed that liberty and freedom (which is necessary to exist for a writer to practice his craft) are not given to man as a free gift but as a right and a responsibility to be earned if he deserves it, is worthy of it, and is willing to work for it by means of courage and sacrifice , and to defend it always.

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Faulkner spoke against the malaise of fear--fear that can kill freedom, fear that can undeniably kill a writer. If a writer wants to write of the heart, not of the glands, he must teach himself "that the basest of all things is to be afraid, and teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and hounor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labours under a curse."

A Moveable Feast

One of my favorite reads this year has been Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. This book has been on my work desk for several weeks now and every time my colleague and friend Fang Yih sees it, he throws it into the dustbin. He is one of those Hemingway haters. "If he had to write such condensed and pared down prose, why didn't he try poetry?" That's his main grouse against Hemingway. I understand the nature of his complaint and smile away while retrieving the copy from the dustbin. "Perhaps, this is the only good book he ever wrote," Fang Yih admits grudgingly. He is a Pynchonian.

I had read some of Hemingway's stories earlier in the year: I had liked his Nick Adam stories. I haven't paid any serious attention to his novels yet. I had loved The Old Man and the Sea when I had read it some years ago. Nabokov liked his story, The Killers, more than anything else he ever wrote.

Yet, there are many who don't like Hemingway. One of my editor friends, after reading some of my stories that I wrote this year, said one or two stories in my collection read like journalism. Hemingway, in this book, says the same about some of Chekov's stories. So, in hindsight, I take my friend's comment as a compliment. Every story one writes can't be great. Some stories do get shaped up like journalism, even though the attempt is to avoid that effect.

Hemingway in Paris

Hemingway had started writing this book in 1957 and the book was published posthumously in 1964. The book records Hemingway's years in Paris during the 1920s. Then, he was starting up as a young and struggling writer; to begin with, he was stationed in Paris as a correspondent for the Toronto Star. At that time, Braque, Picasso, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Scott Fitzgerald were the shining stars in Paris. Hemingway got to meet and befriend some of these legendary figures. Some chapters in this book tell stories of these legends.

One of the funniest chapters in the book is about Hemingway's travel with Fitzgerald. It is an amazing story in itself, and reveals the character of both the personalities.

In the beginning of the book, when Hemingway meets Gertrude Stein, he comes back with the feeling that he had to be cured of two things: his youth and his love for his wife. He believed work could cure anything and he worked hard to cure himself of these two things. Stein also advised him to buy pictures instead of clothes (to put the money to better use).

Hemingway was poor but he and his wife never thought of themselves as poor. They never accepted it ("We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other). But he knew in his heart that "the one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty bothers."

During their meetings, Stein and Hemingway often discussed writers and writing. Stein advised him not to read Huxley. "Huxley is a dead man. Can't you see he is dead?" she told him. "You should only read what is truly good and what is frankly bad." Huxley wrote inflated trash, she said.

Hemingway said he liked D H Lawrence, especially his short story, The Prussian Officer. Stein said she couldn't read his novels. "He's impossible, pathetic, and preposterous"--that was her judgment. "He writes like a sick man." She admired Sherwood Andersen, never as a writer, but as a person--a warm and kind person.

Books, hunger, writing

In those days, Hemingway had no money to buy books. He borrowed books from Shakespeare and Company, the bookstore of Sylvia Beach. Some of the books he mentions borrowing from her are Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches, D H Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (perhaps), and Constance Garnett edition of War and Peace, and The Gambler and Other Stories by Dostoyevsky.

In "Hunger was good discipline", Hemingway says all the paintings (in a museum) were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. "Hunger is good discipline and you learn from it," he writes.

When Hemingway quit journalism, getting money was a problem. "When I stopped doing newspaper work I was sure the stories were going to be published. But every one I sent out came back."

One day Hemingway tells his woes to Sylvia. He feels ashamed about talking over this matter. "Don't you know all writers ever talk about is their troubles?" Sylvia tells him to comfort him.

Hemingway talks about his stories, Up in Michigan (Stein thought it was inaccrochable), and Out of Season. The real end of the latter story was that the old man in it hangs himself. Hemingway had omitted that ending based on his new theory, that "you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and that the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood".

In a chapter on Ford Maddox Ford, Hemingway does not portray a rosy picture of the writer (he had been through very bad domestic troubles). The two are drinking and a poet named Belloc passes by. Ford cuts him. "Tell me why one cuts people," Hemingway asks. "A gentleman," Ford explained,"will always cut a cad."

Ezra Pound

"Ezra Pound was always a good friend and he was always doing things for people," Hemingway writes. He associated with Pound's movement called Bel Esprit to raise money to free T S Eliot from his bank job so that he could write poetry. Eliot got freed but the movement died soon after.

Pound and Hemingway naturally liked to discuss writers. Hemingway had read Gogol, Tungenev, Tolstoi and Chekov. He had been advised to read Katherine Mansfield in Toronto but after reading Chekov, he felt her writing to be artificial and near-beer. "It was better to drink water. But Chekov was not water except for the clarity." Hemingway was puzzled by Dostoyevsky who wrote so "unbelievably badly" and yet made you feel so deeply. Dostoyevsky seemed to be anti- mot juste. Ezra said he never read the "Rooshians". "Keep to the French," he advised. "You've plenty to learn there."

The next chapter that follows is how he broke up his friendship with Stein. The rift led him to conclude that "there is not much future in men being friends with great women although it can be pleasant enough before it gets better or worse, and there is even less future with truly ambitious women writers." The break left him so shaken that he could not make friends again truly, neither in his heart nor in his head. "When you cannot make friends any more in your head is the worst," he says.

The last chapters are on Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. They are full of insight. But I would like to close this review with a quote from Hem's poet friend, Evan Shipman, who truly did not care if his poems were ever published--he felt that it should remain a mystery.

"We need more true mystery in our lives, Hem," he once told Hemingway. "The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most at this time. There is, of course, the problem of sustenance."

It sounds so true even hundred years later--now in our time when we are living almost naked lives. If the multitude of talentless poets and writers heeded this advice, we would be spared the unbearable trash that is thrown at us each year. It forces us to look back and reach for the gems of the past to survive the brazen assaults. The only difference, between then and now, is not that of the problem of sustenance but of vanity.

And after that there is only travel...

(Warning: Content not suitable for minors)

Perhaps I had mentioned Roberto Bolano's book The Insufferable Gaucho in one of my previous posts. Apart from the story, Alvaro Rousselot's Journey, that I loved, there is an essay in this book that had many marvelous thoughts in it. The essay is called Literature + Illness = Illness. It is dedicated to Bolano's friend the hepatologist, Dr. Victor Vargas. The essay has many sub-topics such as Illness and public speaking, Illness and freedom, Illness and height and so on. The most facilitating sub-chapter is one entitled, Illness and French poetry.

He quotes one of Mallarme's poems from Brise marine:

The flesh is sad--and I've read every book.
O to esacpe--to get away. Birds look
as though they're drunk for unknown spray and skies.

Then Bolano goes on to analyse the poem. "What did Mallarme mean when he said that the flesh was sad and that he'd read all the books? That he'd had his fill of reading and of having sex? That beyond a certain point, every book we read and every act of carnal knowledge is a repetition? And after that there is only travel? That f...g and reading are boring in the end, and that travel is the only way out?"

Then he tries to answer the question posed by Mallarme: "I think Mallarme is taking about illness, about the battle between illness and health: two totalitarian states, or powers if you prefer. I think he is talking about illness tricked out in the rags of boredom."

Under Illness and travel, Bolano writes: "...But it all catches up with you. Children. Books. Illness. The voyage comes to an end."

He then goes over to Baudelaire and quotes some of his lines: Once we have burned our brains out, we can plunge/to Hell or Heaven--any abyss will do--/deep in the Unknown to find the new!

Bolano says: "Rimbaud clearly understood, since he plunged with equal ferver into reading, sex, and travel, only to discover and accept, with a diamond-like lucidity, that writing doesn't matter at all."

Reading, writing, sex, travel--Bolano understands--resemble each other, and all that, is a mirage: there is only the desert and from time to time the remote, degrading lights of oasis.

Even though we feel tired of all the above acts, we have no choice but to go on. Bolano says: "We have to go on exploring sex, books, and travel, although we know that they lead us to the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place where the antidote (to the illness of boredom) can be found."

Dev Anand

I got the news of Dev Anand Saheb's passing away on Facebook yesterday. I saw a friend's status on FB and it contained that dreadful news. It was a grey afternoon and I had taken my daughter out for swimming. The pool was closed because of the rains and the static due to the thunders. We waited for close to two hours and then headed back home.

En route, we decided to stop by for coffee and that's when I told my wife about Dev Saheb's death. He lived a great and respectable life and passed away in peace, she said. How many people get to lead that kind of life? Indeed. Dev Saheb was a lucky man. He enjoyed a lifetime of stardom, being showered with love from lovers of Hindi cinema. He died in his sleep. He was in London for medical check up. He was 88.

I awoke late to the chrisma of Dev Saheb. As a kid, I grew up worshiping the angry young man persona of Amitabh Bachchan. Those were the pre-television days and even to get to watch a Bachchan movie standing up in a hot, jam-packed, and dilapidated cinema hall was a ticket to the heaven. In those days, names like those of Dev Anand, Dilip Kumar and Raj Kumar sounded boring. For me, they were stars who had faded away. I had difficulty believing that young Indian women found them worthy of swooning over!

Once, one of my uncles took me to watch one of Dev Saheb's hit movies. It was Johny Mera Naam. Hmm, not bad, I thought. Later on, I watched Guide. I liked it, more so because it was based on R K Narayan's story. Narayan had many complaints against Dev Saheb but that is another story. I also liked Dev Saheb's work in Kala Bazaar and Taxi Driver. I saw many of these gems while researching for a documentary with my friend and mentor Amir Ullah Khan and Professor Bibek Debroy (Indian Economic Transition through Bollywood Eyes).

As I watched more of his movies, I realised what had happened with him. His performance in some of his earlier films were great because he had not developed his trade mark Dev Anand Style. Later on, he had become a caricature of himself. This happened to many other good actors of Hindi cinema--they got trapped in their trade mark styles: names like Raaj Kumar, Dharmendra, Shatrughan Sinha, even Bachchan Saheb, come to my mind.

Though I had great respect for him, Dev Saheb seemed to have wasted his talent on films unworthy of his attention. He could have been like Clint Eastwood. Eastwood, even at 81, directs excellent films (Gran Torino, Million Dollar Baby, Invictus, to name a few). In his later career, Dev Saheb produced and directed many films, but not a single one is memorable (such as Awwal Number, Main Solah Baras Ki, Love at Times Square). Someone should have stopped him.

However, this does not make him any less great. Long before, he had earned his place in people's heart. I love him for his energy, for his capacity to go on, no matter what. And I will always remember him for the song, Har fikr to dhuyen me udata chala gaya. This is one of my favorite songs, besides the one from Gurudutt Saheb's Pyaasa: Yeh Duniya agar mil bhi jaye toh kya hai.

Dev Saheb, whenever fikr and taraddud surround me, I reach out for that stick and take a drag and sing along with you: Maein Zindagi Ka Saath Nibhata Chala Gaya/Har Fikar Ko Dhuen Mein Udata Chala Gaya

Dev Saheb, wherever you are, rest in peace. We will always love you.

The terror of being a poor Muslim in India

Jimmy the terrorist by Omair Ahmad
Hamish Hamilton, 2010; Rs. 350

Reviewed by Zafar Anjum

Novelist Omair Ahmad has chosen a misleading title for his third work of fiction, Jimmy the Terrorist. Jimmy, a lovingly anglicized version of Jamaal, is not an Islamist terrorist, plotting revenge in a post 9/11 world. As such, Jimmy the Terrorist is not about Islamist terrorism. It is about the terror of being a Muslim in India.

Well, make that a ‘poor’ Muslim in India. Omair brings up the class issue in his narrative, so the main protagonist Jamaal’s being ‘poor’ is quite pertinent here and must be taken note of. And Jamaal’s poverty is not the typical kind of poverty associated with the majority of Muslims and low caste Indians. His father is a teacher, he has a roof over his head, he studies at Moazzamabad’s most venerable school, St. Jude’s—only he doesn’t have the kind of expensive shoes and shirts and pocket money that his other ‘Hindu’ classmates have. Jamaal is ‘that’ kind of poor. He is middle-class poor—that’s where young Indian Muslim terrorists purportedly come from. The category of lower class Muslims—the ones who live in slums—is the fount of gangsters in India, the type you see in Bollywood films.

When the novel begins with a geographical and historical map-making of Moazzamabad in Uttar Pradesh, a certain kind of expectation builds up. Maybe it is because of the kind of news we have been receiving in the last few years—the stories of Indian police branding innocent young Muslim boys as terrorists and killing them for awards and trophies. When Omair evokes Moazzamabad and Rasoolpur, we hope to read about a sample biography of one of the terrorist boys from Azamgarh. I thought Jimmy the Terrorist would do for fiction what Tehelka does for non-fiction in India. At the same time, I was worried that the novelist would do what he is not supposed to do—bringing the news.

I was wrong.

Omair exceeds my expectations. He goes into India’s heart of darkness (actually he comes from there) and returns with a tale that reflects the reality of Indian Muslims today. His tale is ordinary, even deceptively simple in its plotting and narration but in its bosom is the picture of India’s underbelly and how it perceives its existence in a climate of Hinduvta-based politics.

The story is so plain that if I were a neocon reviewer, drawing a fat salary from one of the American think-tanks, I would have dismissed the book in a few sentences. Why make a fuss over a dead Muslim boy in a god-forsaken small town in Uttar Pradesh? Look at the numbers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims have died. And wait! The number of deaths would be even more spectacular after the folly of revolutions in the Middle East. So, why care about Jimmy—I would have said.

Yet, the story Omair wants to share with us is important. And he does it with a simplicity which is hard to achieve, especially in setting up a story in the backdrop of India’s communal politics. Omair pulls the challenge off with ease and dexterity. Through his two main characters, Rafiq and his son Jamaal, the novelist brings into sharp relief the Muslim alienation in India today that has developed over two generations since Independence. The older protagonist, Rafiq, becomes an angry demagogue; the younger one, Jimmy, does not speak; he stores his anger until it explodes in a violent climax. Unlike his father, he lacks the safety valve of hate speech.

Omair shows that his two characters haven’t chosen their attitudes. Their circumstances have turned them into who they are. The story is precisely about this transformation in their nature. And the understanding of that mechanism that Omair brings to his reader is his main achievement in this novel.

When Rafiq, who aspired to be a poet and wanted acceptance in a local poetry circle, loses everything he so painstakingly has built over the years, he is forced to take a job at an Islamic school. Formerly a geography lecturer in a college, he is not sure how to go about his job interview. One of his friends teaches him the trick to land the job:

“Just be angry,” Haris said. “Rant and rave. Talk about the grand tragedies, about oppression, zulm, riots and murder. Grow your beard a little longer and miss no opportunity to raise your voice against the suffering of Muslims. It’s what the Mullahs do all the time.”

This cultivated anger gives Rafiq a sort of power that he never had and he carries this trick wherever he goes, to great success.

Jamaal, Rafiq’s son, on the other hand, grows pensive and inward-looking at St. Jude’s. “Being a winner requires more than just being first in a race: a victory is never quite that unless there are people who will acknowledge your triumph. It was the reason Jamaal never stood first in any of his exams.” At school, Jamaal also learns that there is a price to success, and the price isn’t simply hard work.

In the novel, Omair mentions many things: partition, communal riots, Sanjay Gandhi’s nasbandi programme, demolition of Babri Masjid and Advani’s Rath Yatra. But not once does he mention Pakistan. This omission is strange; or maybe it is a welcome relief for many Indian readers. But I wonder if the protagonists ever imagine what their fate would have been in Pakistan. Would they have fared better there?

Since Omair’s Jimmy the Terrorist has emerged out of a set of short stories, the seams have marked the narrative. More than half way through the book, one protagonist fades off and another protagonist takes over. If the story is about Jimmy, tell us Jimmy’s story—some readers might feel that way.

Even though the narrator’s voice in the novel is warm and mellifluous, it sometimes tires you. That is the other problem with the novel. Omair’s tendency to overexplain things slows down the narrative.

Jimmy the Terrorist is no Booker Prize material (here I humbly disagree with the novel’s publisher who had thought that it was Booker prize material)—it does not have the level of complexity and technical finesse of a great work of fiction but given the fact that the Chetan Bhagats are ruling the roost in India, it is encouraging to see young writers like Omair Ahmad trying their hand at serious fiction. Jimmy the Terrorist should be applauded for that daring itself.

This review was written in March and a version of it appeared in Indian Literature (published by Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi) in August 2011.

Paris on my mind

For the last few weeks, Paris has been on my mind.

It all started with Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. I had seen the movie on a plane en route to Shanghai. I had loved it for the sheer fact that it has characters that portray literary figures such as Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. And Marion Cotillard--she is divine even though she is in a cameo in the movie. I had loved Hemingway's (played by Corey Stoll) macho dialogues. "No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure," says his character at one point in the film. I also loved the scene where Gil (Owen Wilson) asks Hemingway to read his novel. Papa says he hates it. "Why?" asks Gill, "You haven't even read it". "If it's bad, I'll hate it," says Papa. "If it's good, then I'll be envious and hate it even more. You don't want the opinion of another writer."

There are many such memorable scenes in that movie from the Paris of 1920s when Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, James Joyce, Piccasso, Ford Maddox Ford, Ezra Pound and Scott Fitzgerald, among others, enlivened the literary world of Paris.

I mentioned this, my love for Paris arising from the movie, to one of my friends in Paris and she invited me to visit the city in December. How sweet of her! Alas, I cannot make it as I may have to travel to India in connection with a book.

But ever since, almost anything I have touched has some Paris in it. Weired, isn't it?

One day I picked up this book from the library which I thought would have nothing to do with Paris. It is called The Insufferable Gaucho by Roberto Bolano. Now I have loved some of Bolano's works, not all of them.
In this book, there is a lovely essay, Literature + Illness = Illness but the story that I loved most in the collection is titled Alavaro Rousselot's Journey. It is about a lesser known Argentine novelist Alavaro Rousselot who takes a trip to Paris to hunt down a French filmmaker who he thought was his most ardent reader/follower and who had made his name by making films that had plots similar to the plots of novels that Alavaro had written earlier in his career. It is a beautiful story and it ends poignantly like all good stories should, touching you somewhere on the spine, to make it atingle (to borrow that Nabokovian phrase).

The next two books I picked up and read also had a lot of Paris in it. One is a book of interviews of Nabokov, selected by the great writer himself. He had spent parts of his youth in Berlin and Paris as an immigrant and he talks about seeing Joyce and Aleksei Tolstoy there. Joyce once even came to one of his talks that he was made to give at the last minute after a famous Eastern European writer failed to appear at a scheduled event.

The other book that I have been enjoying a great deal is A Moveable Feast by Hemingway. As you may know, this book is Hemingway's tribute to Paris and an elegy to the remarkable group of expats that formed the literary and artistic life of the Paris of the 1920s. In this book, I have loved the chapters on Scott and Zelda. His struggle to become a writer amid poverty should inspire all poor writers, like myself. It was strange to read how Hemingway treated poverty, exactly like me: "We did not think ever of ourselves as poor," he says. "We did not accept it. We thought we were superior people and other people that we looked down on and rightly mistrusted were rich." Reading Papa's words brought me some relief; only I do not believe in the inferior and superior bit, but I would certainly never respect anyone just because he/she is rich. Only two qualities - piety and knowledge - will generate awe in me for a person.

It was about Paris that Hemingway wrote to one of his friends in 1950: "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast."

I know Paris has changed since Hemingway's time. But after reading so much about Paris and having watched so many great French films, why won't I wish to see Paris? I know it is a matter of time. At least, I hope so.